| Chandra is chief scientist for Industry.Net, which has pioneered business-to-business electronic commerce since August 1994 with a database-driven Web site and user registration and authentication. The real fruits of electronic commerce have not been flashy shopping malls, but workaday business-to-business commerce. Industry.Net runs more than 4,000 Internet-based business centers of electronic commerce for manufacturers, distributors and service providers. Chandra's next innovation is global intelligent agents and a scalable agent architecture. These diffAgents entered alpha in
July.
"Browsing the Web will go away because it is too painful a process," Chandra says. "I see a future in which the agents will be able to negotiate, learn user preferences, search and ferret out information for people. They will also provide access to data that may not be on the Web
and collect that information for you in a way that you want to see it."
Chandra envisions a model in which people describe their queries in more natural terms. A user of Industry.Net might ask: "Find me all of the ball valves in southern Kentucky," for instance, and multiple intelligent agents, each with a specialty, will search and filter the Web and other online resources to deliver the valve distributors that fit the description.
"The challenge is finding how to integrate these agents with legacy systems," he says. The Web browser is the major delivery point, but without a networked computer and constant Internet connectivity, the Web isn't the most convenient delivery mechanism--nor is it the only one. Combine the different delivery mechanisms--fax, print and even the U.S. Postal Service--and agents can deliver the i
nformation sought with little user intervention. Chandra says he believes that constant Internet connectivity and networked computers, inevitable by the year 2000, combined with intelligent agents specialized to their tasks, will bring a future to homes and businesses in which agents do your information research, discover bargains, find movies and scout recipes. We can't wait.
Contribution Past 12 Months:Developing the Internet strategy for Industry.Net.
Next 12 Months: Global intelligent agents and a scalable agent architecture.
Millennium Forecast: The seamless, ubiquitous presence of networks. The network will always be there and will always be on.
Millennium Disturbance: Standards are required for interoperability but they
stifle innovation. With the Internet, we don't know what we want and we don't know what we can achieve, so we can't set standards.Car: Chrysler Cirrus
|
REPORTS
ANALYTICS
Follow 
